Can China Save the Amur Tiger?

Assuming the southwestern
population remains healthy, the larger question is how to help the tigers
expand back into China, where they are now welcome, despite a 1993 ban on the
tiger bone trade, mainly as an ingredient in folk nostrums for erectile
dysfunction and other human maladies.

Along China’s Manchurian border with
Russia and North Korea, the forest extends for 28,000 square miles (73,000
square kilometers), of which about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square
kilometers), an area two-thirds the size of Connecticut, is cat-egorized as
tiger habitat. Russian tigers already occasionally make the crossing into this
habitat. But they tend either to prey on cattle there or to leave with, what
Rudyard Kipling once described as, “the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a
tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.”
There’s nothing much to catch, according to Miquelle, because East Manchuria’s
impoverished human population traps anything that moves. But Han and Oliver
contend that it’s also because heavy logging up into the 1980s has left the forest
structure too dense for most prey species. The fate of the tiger may hang on
the outcome of their disagreement.

Poaching Versus Poor Habitat

A native of the Boston suburbs,
Miquelle came to Yale in the early 1970s for its English department. But an introductory
biology class taught by mammalogist John Kirsch got him excited enough to
switch his major. Steve Berwick, a predator specialist then teaching at
F&ES, helped steer him into a career as a wildlife biologist. Miquelle
earned his doctorate at the University of Idaho, where Maurice Hornocker was
pioneering the use of radio telemetry to track mountain lions and other large
preda-tors. When Russian scientists invited Hornocker to help launch the
Siberian Tiger Project, he enlisted Miquelle to begin trapping and
radio-collaring the most elusive tiger in the world. Though he was reluctant at
first, Miquelle wound up not only loving the work, but marrying a Russian woman
and making a home in the small coastal town of Terney, just outside
Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik.

In the years since, he and his
Russian colleagues have used radio collars to track the movements of about 60
tigers. The work has routinely involved getting close enough to an angry tiger
caught in a snare to hit it with a tranquilizer dart, then getting much closer,
in the hope that the tranquilizer dose will be adequate to keep the animal down
while they collar it and take measurements and specimens. At times, it’s also
meant tracking a tiger from a rickety Soviet-era helicopter at treetop height,
then dropping down on a wire to work with the more-or-less tranquilized animal
on the ground.

The average range of tigers in the
Russian Far East is huge—600 square miles (1,554 square kilometers) for males
and just under half that for females. The frustrations of the work can also be
monumental for other reasons: The team tracked one female named Olga for 13
years, during which she gave birth six times and reared at least six cubs to
maturity. “We were hoping she would die of old age,” says Miquelle, “but she
died the way most tigers die, killed by a poacher.” Another study animal turned
up dead on the highway. In spite of all that, says Seidensticker, the Siberian
Tiger Project has put together “one of the most complete portraits of a large
predator that we have. What Dale has done with his Russian colleagues in terms
of understanding the tiger is nothing short of miraculous.”

So it’s a little startling to hear
Chad Oliver, a soft-spoken silviculturalist who heads the Yale Global Institute
of Sustainable Forestry, say that when it comes to restoring tigers to their
former habitat in Manchuria, Miquelle is taking an approach that’s not just
wrong, but wrong in a way that “could lead the Amur tiger to extinction.” The
dispute came to a head this summer as the World Bank was drafting a major Amur
tiger recovery plan for northeasterm China.

To get tigers back to China,
Miquelle, the F&ES team and the World Bank all focus on restoring the
population of deer, wild boar and other prey species. A single tiger needs to
eat 50 or so ungulates a year to survive. So no ungulates means no tigers, or
tigers that are forced to prey on livestock. Oliver, Han and their colleagues
want to improve the badly degraded forest so that it produces more of the
acorns and pine nuts on which ungulates feed and includes the kinds of open
space or cover that different ungulate species prefer. But Miquelle points out
that China has yet to take the essential first step of stopping the ubiquitous
poaching of ungulates for the dinner pot. Even in the Hunchun Tiger Leopard
Reserve on the Russian border, cheap snares made of wire or plastic strips are
everywhere. An annual volunteer day has removed 10,000 of them from the reserve
since 2001.

“You can do all the forestry
treatments you want and not increase prey numbers if poaching is not
addressed,” Miquelle told World Bank officials. “On the other hand, if you
address poaching as your top priority, ungulates will increase quite
dramatically, with or without forest treatments.”

At first glance, the tone of the
dispute seems to echo the temperament of the animal. Naturalist lore says that
big-predator researchers often take on the fierceness and territoriality of the
animals they study. Thus when Oliver and Han first asked for detailed data from
the Amur tiger radio-tracking studies, Miquelle declined. Han’s colleagues on
the study included Jianping Ge from Beijing Normal University, where Han earned
her master’s degree, and Qingxi Guo from China’s Northeast Forestry University.
The team, says Miquelle, seemed “interested only in how much they can extract
from other organizations for their own relatively narrow interests” and offered
little likelihood of collaboration to “maximize conservation impact.” Han
protests that the team has, in fact, already collaborated with World Wildlife
Fund researchers and would also gladly do so with Miquelle and WCS.

Oliver characterizes it as a clash
not so much between personalities, or nationalities, as between environmental
paradigms. As zoologists, Miquelle and his allies “may not realize that they
are dealing with an outdated scientific paradigm,” Oliver told the World Bank.
The preservationist approach, which became widespread in the 1960s, regards all
forests as good for wildlife, a dense forest as even better, and all human
intervention, particularly in the form of logging, as almost automatically bad.
The guiding idea is that forests should be left to grow to their mature climax
stage, achieving a more-or-less steady state sometimes characterized as “the
balance of nature.”

Oliver is a leading exponent of an
alternative paradigm, which also got its start in the mid-20th century. It
holds that no such thing as a balance of nature exists. Disturbance and
turmoil, in the form of fire, wind, disease and drought, are normal, and the
natural result is a mosaic of structures, from open savanna to old growth. A
healthy forest is dynamic, not stable, with tree stands of varying types and
ages. Many environmentalists now accept this paradigm, at least intellectually.
But the preservationist paradigm still has a hold on their hearts, or on the
realpolitik corners of their brains. The sticking point for them is that they
mistrust the proposed remedies of logging, controlled burning and other forms
of active management to make damaged forests healthy again.

But clinging to “the steady-state
paradigm” and letting damaged forests simply grow back on their own can be
disastrous, says Oliver. In California in the 1970s, for instance, state
wildlife officials suppressed fires and allowed bog and grasslands to grow into
dense forest. But the lotis blue butterfly, a species endemic to a small
coastal area of Mendocino County, needed open space, not forest, and the loss
of habitat may have pushed it to extinction. More recently, the predisposition
to regard closed forest as the only productive habitat led a wildlife biologist
in Florida to assume that the severely endangered Florida panther was a “forest
obligate” that would not cross about 300 feet (90 meters) of nonforest habitat.
Over the years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relied on the biologist’s
data to formulate its species recovery plan and to make development decisions
affecting 38,484 acres of panther habitat. Then it turned out that the
biologist had simply discarded almost half his radio-tracking data, because
evidence that the panthers were using open swampland didn’t fit with his forest
hypothesis.

A steady-state approach could also
be catastrophic for Amur tiger recovery in northeastern China, according to
Han, Oliver and their co-authors. The region experienced intensive logging from
the 1890s up through the end of the Cultural Revolution. The result is that
most forests there are now young and dense, a tangle of pencil-thin saplings
crowded together with shrubby undergrowth, says Han, who surveyed the forests
on foot and supplemented what she saw with analysis of official inventory data
and satellite imagery.

A regimen of thinning and
controlled burning would dramatically accelerate the move away from the current
dense and depopulated habitat, according to Oliver. Freeing up overcrowded oaks
and pines would help them grow faster, resulting, after as little as five to 10
years, in increased production of acorns and pine nuts. Clear-cuts would provide
critical savanna habitat. “If we do nothing,” says Oliver, “the dense forest
will still be there after 50 years.”

Unfortunately, no studies exist to
say how many ungulates different forest structures in the region could support
or how that would affect the Amur tiger’s recovery there. Han hopes to gather
that data with a pilot project through China’s State Forestry Administration,
equivalent to the U.S. Forest Service. Based on data from other tiger
populations, she and her co-authors assume that the current dense forest
structure supports about 6.1 ungulates per square kilometer. For a hungry Amur
tiger, that translates into a minimum home range of 288 square miles (745
square kilometers)—about 14 times bigger than the city of New Haven. By
contrast, the tiger could get by with about half that home range in a complex
forest, combining mature trees with a healthy understory, which would support
14 ungulates. Open habitat would support 41 ungulates. From a tiger’s
perspective, that’s almost seven times as much food as in dense structure,
enabling it to thrive in a home range of just 43 square miles (112 square
kilometers)—about two New Havens.

Han’s proposed pilot study would
affect an area of about 71 square miles (185 square kilometers), meaning “you’d
have trouble finding it” in the overall forest, says Oliver. But the study
needs tiger and ungulate experts, like Miquelle, to help plan the best mix of
open space with closed forest, or of hiding cover and browsing cover. “Do you
want long, winding clear-cuts, or do you want a big square clear-cut?” Oliver
asks. The first might be suitable for prey species that like to stay close to
an edge, so they can run back into the forest. The second might be better for
species that like lots of open space so they can see a threat in time to get
away.